


set you free(from who you were supposed to be)

by falloutboiruto



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations
Genre: Anxiety, Comedy, Depression, F/M, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Misunderstandings, Rivalry, Teenage Drama, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-12-01 19:56:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20881829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falloutboiruto/pseuds/falloutboiruto
Summary: Sumire is soon moving out of Konohagakure to work at the Scientific Ninja Tools Research Lab, but little does she know that she’s just a silly misunderstanding short of having a major falling out with her friends.





	set you free(from who you were supposed to be)

**Author's Note:**

> title from: "sex yeah" by marina (and the diamonds)  
beta read by: @reaperduckling

It was a crisp early evening in Konohagakure, colder than it had any business being. However, Sumire was cozy inside but in an unusual setting. She was at Cho Cho’s house, because:

_“Surprise!” had Cho Cho cheered earlier that afternoon, throwing colorful confetti in the air. Sumire had stood in the doorway of her apartment, equal parts happy about this unforeseen turn of events and equal parts not looking forward to having to sweep the confetti up later(nervously she pondered if her landlord could consider any traces of confetti left as _littering_)_

_“We’re throwing you a surprise sleepover, as the last get-together before you move!” Sarada had elaborated, grinning ear to ear. _

_“Get your jammies and your butt to my house, because we’re gonna have the night of our lives,” Cho Cho had said. “Namida and Wasabi are coming too, it’s just gonna be us girls.”_

Said and done, all of them sitting in a companionable 5 person circle on Cho Cho’s fluffy pink carpeted bedroom floor, they of course only talked about only the juiciest subjects.

“So, the boys in our year group. They… _exist_. Like, should we rate them?” Cho Cho said.

“_Yuck_, no!” Wasabi said. “Can’t we talk about anything other than guys for a change?”

“Fair enough,” Cho Cho said, pointing at Wasabi as if she was giving her a score point in a game show. “We could play _The Syms_ if that’s better? I have a cheat code that basically destroys the game inside out but you get unlimited money and unlock secret outfits.”

“Oh!” Sarada said. “I know a trick to kill Syms really easily by removing the pool ladder while they’re taking a swim, we should try that too!”

“That’s _so_ mean,” Namida squealed, already crying. Sumire patted her on the shoulder for emotional support while Wasabi just rolled her eyes, and Cho Cho seemed to get the picture fast.

Diverting attention away from the current subject, Cho Cho said: “Uh, or we could do makeovers? I have a trimmer so if someone wants to shave part of or their entire head that would work." She shrugged her shoulders flippantly, like shaving your head was just another normal sleepover activity.

But it did sound kind of fun.

“I’ll do it!” Sumire said. “We can shave off my braid or something, I think an undercut sounds cool.”

This was met with horrified stares from everyone but Cho Cho, who clapped her hands excitedly.

“Is this because you’re moving?” Wasabi shivered. ”You don’t have to do this-“

"-You heard her!" Cho Cho said, already getting the trimmer out of a basket. Sarada shrugged, seeming to come around a bit.

“To be fair, it’s literally just hair,” she said, waving her hands in the air in a noncommittal fashion. “It’ll grow out.”

Sumire nodded enthusiastically, despite Namida now bawling her eyes out in the corner. Cho Cho turned on the trimmer and Sumire’s long purple braid was suddenly no more. It was like she had been freed of her past sins<strike>(if she ever could be)</strike> and could work towards a future helping the village she had once tried to betray. A fresh, stubbly start.

“Do you like it?” Cho Cho asked.

“I love it,” she responded, truthfully.

Of course, it was a lot to ask of a Do-It-Yourself haircut.

-

Sumire left Konoha with the well-wishes of all her acquaintances and friends(they'd had a 10-minute group hug during the morning after the slumber party because the girls _would miss her so much). _Shino-sensei and Mr. Sai had even written her a letter of recommendation to give to her new boss(she hadn’t had the heart to point out that it hadn’t been needed as she was already hired).

Work was fun, once she applied herself to it. But she still missed her friends.

-

Sumire stayed in touch with Sarada and Cho Cho on the chat site Discurse and played _The Syms _together in multiplayer mode on the computer in her dorm room. It was pretty fun, and today they had created a hot eligible bachelor S_ym_ that was destined to date a bunch of self-insert girls. They couldn’t decide on a name, though.

"I think that his name should be Mr. Cool," Cho Cho's tinny voice said decisively through voice chat.

“I still think we should kill him off,” Sarada said.

Sumire looked at the pixels at the computer screen. The hunky _Sym_ character they’d created was blond and blue-eyed, and it immediately made her think of Boruto. Thinking of him made a lot of fluttery feelings that had grown bittersweet nowadays due to distance stir in her chest. She wanted to explore those feelings but at the same time as she wanted to never speak of it, _ever_. So she came up with the perfect solution and typed in "Zoruto" as the character's name.

The voice chat line went completely silent for a moment, but only a moment later exploded in Sarada’s and Cho Cho’s joint laughter, making Sumire flinch.

“ZORUTO? Are you serious?” Cho Cho wheezed. “That sounds just like Boruto! Like, he’s not a hunk, he’s a dweeb!”

“He still believes in cooties, I’ll have you know,” Sarada sniffed more bitterly than Sumire could’ve ever anticipated.

“I just like the name, ok? It has nothing to do with Boruto!” Sumire defended herself with. Her hands were starting to shake and her breath was coming up short. She felt a flush blooming on her cheeks, and-

"All right, we'll go with Zoruto," Cho Cho snickered and started the game.

Together they controlled the newly moved-in Zoruto’s every move in _SymTown,_ designed his house and got him a job as a firefighter and Sumire suddenly saw a girl _Sym _with purple hair very alike her own walk across the digital street.

“Oh, she’s pretty!” Sumire said. “They would get cute kids together.”  
“What?” Sarada said and muttered something unintelligible under her breath.

Suddenly, Sarada was making Zoruto walk towards a nearby pool.

“What are you doing, Sarada?” Cho Cho asked.

“Yeah, I think we should set him up with the purple-haired girl!” Sumire said.

“I think not,” Sarada said. Zoruto entered the pool under Sarada’s control, and she removed the pool ladder.

“SARADA!” Sumire yelled, suddenly extremely upset. She tried to make enter Buy mode to re-buy the pool ladder, but Sarada had already hit the fast forward button and Zoruto was swimming himself to exhaustion. A few seconds later, he sank to the bottom of the pool, dead.

There was only slience in the voice chat, except for what sounded like the crunch of popcorn being eaten.

“Soooo,” Cho Cho said between munches of popcorn. “We can move the grave stone to our next characters’ house so that Zoruto’s ghost can haunt them forever. It’ll be fun!”

Sarada hummed agreeingly, but Sumire was feeling like her soul had left her body. Silently, she left the voice chat and clicked the block button on both of their profiles. She then cried herself to sleep, devastated.

-

The morning after, Sumire came to realize that her reaction last night had been incredibly out of proportion. Childish, dumb, _stupid. _She had been truly awful to her friends. She booted up the computer to unblock them, but when she opened the Discurse website she realized something.

She had just blocked them for no reason. They must be furious with her, and she couldn’t ever explain herself in a way that didn’t reveal just how much of a bad person she was. So, she turned off the computer and got ready for the day instead, and focused on doing research work. Anything to distract herself with, and it worked, almost.

For several weeks.

-

Working on controlling Nue was all that she needed to do. She didn’t need her old life, her old friends, her old mistakes.

-Sumire’s cell phone suddenly buzzed with a text.

**Wasabi: **

**Hey Sumire! Cho Cho and Sarada told me that you blocked them on Discurse, why did you do that? They seemed really upset about it. **

Sumire’s hands started shaking. She couldn’t tell Wasabi about what had happened, she’d be furious with her too. So, Sumire turned off her cell phone and hid it, to never ever think of it again.

It didn’t work.

-

Now, it was like everything in Sumire’s life now revolved around what Cho Cho and Sarada could possibly think of her. The awful, horrible idea of them speaking or even _thinking_ ill of her dominated her head so badly that it was crushing her under its weight. It was making her resent them, resent their friendship, resent the way she had left Konoha and was currently in a research facility far away from her surely now ex-friends.

She was trapped, like a rat in a maze. She looked ratty too, as her undercut had grown out, giving her hair a bit of a frumpy shape. She forgot to take showers, forgot to change clothes, and forgot to go to work much to the concern of her colleagues. They tried and tried talking to her, but she kept turning them away.

She was beyond help.

-

The difference between day and night became fuzzy and confusing, and the days started blending together.

-

Sometimes she took her phone out of its hiding place, but she always immediately put it back. She didn’t deserve a second chance.

-

Sumire was just staring into one of the walls of her dorm room like she expected it to somehow change shape if she looked at it hard enough. Until it suddenly did.

The sudden sound of shattered glass, a rock smashing into said wall, denting it-

Sumire wildly looked around but saw no-one, expect that her window was now broken. A loud song suddenly started playing, a song that she remembered hearing at the sleepover oh so long ago, a song that all her then-friends and her had danced along to.

“SUMIRE!” Sarada’s voice yelled. “Come out of your room or we’ll climb up there ourselves!”

Sumire gingerly stepped towards the window, avoiding the broken glass, and peered outside. Cho Cho and Sarada were standing outside the window, far down on the ground. Cho Cho was yielding a giant boombox lifted over her head, explaining where the song, _their song_, had come from.

Sumire felt like she wanted to run away again, but something made her climb out of the window and carefully walk down, using her chakra control to stick her feet to the wall.

“Where have you been?” Cho Cho said, turning the volume of the music down. “We thought that you were dead.”

“I was just… here,” Sumire said. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

Sarada lifted an eyebrow. “Really?” she snarked.

“And you look terrible! Good thing I brought a care package with face masks for us to use,” said Cho Cho.

Sumire’s heart skipped a beat, her world returning to being in-color again.

“You’re not angry with me?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?” Sarada yelled. “Of course we’re mad! You just blocked us and disappeared for no reason!”

“But why are you here then?”

“Because we’re friends? _Duh_!” Cho Cho said. “You need to take a shower, and then we’re gonna talk, OK?”

-

“So. Let me get this straight,” Sarada said, eye twitching. “You blocked us because I killed your _Sym_ character? Zoruto? We thought that you had been kidnapped by the mafia!”

Sumire wrung her hands in her lap. She was sitting on her dorm room bed, Cho Cho and Sarada towering over her. They had swept up all of the glass shards while Sumire had been in the shower, though.

“Yeah. I know it was stupid but… I just thought you guys hated me after that so I just. Uh, kept avoiding you,” Sumire explained weakly.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Cho Cho said. “But like, why would we hate you because you blocked us on Discurse? That’s the pettiest imagined drama I’ve ever heard of.”

“I don’t know,” Sumire said.

There was a long silence. Sumire hated silence.

“Look,” Sarada said. “I’m sorry for killing off Zoruto. It’s just that I didn’t like that you set him up with a girl _Sym. _But I should’ve just said that instead of just taking over the game.”

“Wait, why was that even an issue?” Cho Cho gasped. “I thought you just liked killing _Syms_?”

Sarada’s face flushed and she suddenly seemed to have a lot of trouble keeping eye contact.

“Well,” Sarada began, uncertainly. “He was supposed to be Boruto, right? It just made me kind of mad to see him with another girl.”

Something in Sumire’s mind clicked, and by the looks of it, Cho Cho had come to the same conclusion.

“Sumire’s crush on Boruto could be seen from space, but _you too, _Sarada?” Cho Cho asked, exasperated.

Sarada just kind of shrugged and looked around the room on anything but them. Sumire could relate.

“OK. This has gone way too far,” Cho Cho said. “It’s fine to have a crush on the same guy, and it’s something true friends can’t ever be divided over. Got it?”

She turned around and started rummaging through her bag, while Sumire could do nothing but stare at Sarada.

“Let’s_ never_ fight over a guy ever again,” Sumire said, with utmost sincerity. She meant every word. Sarada was very preoccupied with scratching the back of her head, but something in her nervously shifting eyes told Sumire that she agreed.

They then proceeded to have a spa-night, and Cho Cho touched up on Sumire’s undercut. It was perfect, both the haircut and the company, and Sumire felt happier than ever.

**Author's Note:**

> please leave kudos and comments if you like this! :D


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